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Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Belknap, 2013.
This book places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans. It traces the connections between planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency and looks at the intertwining themes of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism. The “flush times”—the concomitant booms in the land market, the cotton market, and the slave market—reshaped the Mississippi Valley in the 1830s. At the core of this expansion was slavery. Slaves were central to cultivation of the land (bales per acre per hand) and the production of the commodity. Thus, capitalism and slavery were tethered and interdependent (slave racial capitalism). There was a corresponding interdependence between the market mechanisms that made cotton the cornerstone of the political economy, and the enslaved whose labor produced that cotton for the market. Metrics of exchange in Liverpool influenced the labor practices of Louisiana and the labor practices of Louisiana shaped the practice of the global market. This meant that “the commercial standards of the wider economy” (i.e. the value of cotton at any given moment in any given market) could shape the “labor practices of Louisiana,” (i.e. the number of lashes a slave might receive for dropping a bale of cotton or trying to escape, 110). Slaveholders, in effect, were commercially minded and understood slavery to be a direct link to the global economy. For example, Pro-slavery political economists (Matthew Fontaine Maury) looked to free trade – to a relation with the global economy unmediated by the territorial sovereignty of the United States. Their commercial interests also drove slaveholders imperial interests in Cuba and Nicaragua (Narciso López’s 1849-51 raids on Cuba and William Walker’s 1857 conquest of Nicaragua) and started the movement to re-open the slave trade with West Africa. All of this was to maintain the market, control it volatility, and create a haven for restless nonslaveholding whites. Johnson thus contends that the build up of the Civil War was more than just a sectional conflict. The South was more concerned with Cuba, Venezuela, and Africa than Kansas and Missouri. It’s not so much that the South was seceding from, but what they were seceding to: an expansive Caribbean slave racial capitalism. Key - Chapter 9: The sale of cotton reflect the growing credit market, but also an insurance industry to protect crops and packaging that made it commercial viable (fetishization) and made it suitable for speculation. In all of this, the slaveholders played a key role: they stood between the schedule of the money market and the cotton trade demands of their obligation and the natural rhythms of the seasons, between hypothetical paper and real cotton. All of which were uncontrollable factors and, thus, they translated the imperatives of time-scaled commercial instruments into the astringent temporality of the lash: slave labor. Slaves were capital, both in the sense that it produced the cotton and also could be sold. See also: Walter Johnson (1), Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, Leslie Harris Also: Extends temporal and geographical framework of the "market revolution" and connects capitalism with slavery (slave racial capitalism)